ALMOST PERFECT GET-AWAY
by Diane Daniels Manning
My “day job” is running a school for bright children with serious emotional needs. It is highly rewarding, but when school vacations roll around, I often decompress in Mexico where I have a supportive group of writer friends. I fly out of Houston and in two hours am in Guadalajara, on my way to Lake Chapala, a gorgeous lake in the mountains of Jalisco. Most people have never heard of it, but it is large enough that even a world map shows it as a blue dot in central Mexico. I especially enjoy getting away from the super hot summers in Houston to the mountain coolness, with lots of rain and thunderstorms. Just like Camelot, the rain falls mostly at night.
A string of small Mexican villages line the north side of the lake from the towns of Chapala to Jacotopec, and they are full of American and Canadian expats, some of whom are fulltime residents. Others are snowbirds or sunbirds. It’s only an eight hundred mile trip from Texas to the Jalisco mountains, but I feel sometimes like I’ve been in a time machine that deposited me into slow-moving villages of cobblestones, horses in the street, shops that close at siesta time and bustling open markets. Living or visiting there has been described as attending the best summer camp in the world--- only for adults.
The support of writing friends there has been terrifically important. When I am in Mexico, I am (almost) free of the stresses of my day job, and am able to really concentrate on writing. Two of these friends have published best sellers. We meet for critique sessions and, depending on the time, either retire to a nearby coffee shop or, if it’s later, sip a margarita.
When it’s time to go back home, I feel sad, but refreshed, and ready to begin again.
If you would like to have your pet’s photo posted as one of McCreery’s Friends, send it via the “Perfect Dogs” button at www.almostperfectnovel.com.
The Book
Genre: christian fiction
About Almost Perfect:
Two unlikely friends, an old woman and a boy with special needs, take an aging champion to Westminster Dog Show, and heal their troubled families.Source: Info in the About Almost Perfect was from the press kit from the publicity team.
Seventy year-old Bess Rutledge has fantasized about winning the Westminster Dog Show all her life, but now she has decided she is too old to follow her dream. She meets Benny, an angry fourteen year-old with mild autism and ADHD, who has a dream of his own: to impress his self-absorbed mother. He becomes convinced that winning Westminster with McCreery, Bess’ aging champion standard poodle, will finally make his mother proud of him. Getting Bess to go along with his plan, however, is not going to be so easy.
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Meet The Author
Diane Daniels Manning is the co-founder and director of The New School in the Heights, a therapeutic school in Houston, Texas which helps children dealing with social-emotional challenges find success in school and life. She has a Ph.D. in Education and a post-doctoral M.P.H from Harvard and is a practicing child psychoanalyst certified by the American Psychoanalytic Association. Formerly, she was the Director of the Reading and Learning Disabilities Clinic at Tufts University, Lecturer and Research Associate in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Harvard, and Chair of the Department of Education at Tulane University. She learned the inner workings of dog show kennels by writing an authorized oral history of a lifetime President of the Poodle of Club of America. Her writing awards include the Faulkner-Wisdom Novella Prize and the Women in Film and Television Short Script Competition.
When not at The New School, Diane and her writing partners, a Standard Poodle named Misty and a rescue cat named Elvira, convene at the keyboard to share great thoughts and plan the dinner menu.
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Giveaway
Prize: Giving away 13 copies of Almost Perfect by Diane Daniels Manning (5 print copies - USA only, 5 ebook copies and 3 audiobooks from Audible - international) and one $25 Amazon Gift Card (open international) Ends Feb 20, 2015
You can also win one $50, $25 or $10 Amazon Gift Card on author’s website. The author will ask a question about the book as an entry.
You can also win one $50, $25 or $10 Amazon Gift Card on author’s website. The author will ask a question about the book as an entry.
Because I love anything related to dogs.
ReplyDeleteMy daughter loves dogs and would love to read this
ReplyDeleteI think that this would be a good book to read with the girls age 8 and 12.
ReplyDeleteThank you for reading and reviewing ALMOST PERFECT! And good luck to everyone who enters the Trivia Contest on my site (www.dianedanielsmanning.com)! Sincerely, – Diane Daniels Manning, author, ALMOST PERFECT
ReplyDeleteThe premise, about the the mentor, the dog, and the struggling young man, sounds very intriguing!
ReplyDelete